Dezeen Magazine

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Italian-Singaporean designers Lanzavecchia + Wai have designed a collection of aids for the elderly with styling that's more domestic than medical.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Called No Country For Old Men, the series includes walking canes with integrated trays, iPad stands or baskets, a chair that's easier to get out of thanks to a foot bar for tipping it forward and a lamp with a magnifying screen.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Materials like wood and marble integrate the pieces in a domestic interior where their standard counterparts can feel alien outside a clinical environment.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

They presented the objects as part of Salone Satellite at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan last month.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Yves Behar recently collaborated with new brand Sabi to launch a range of medical aids to tackle the stigma of products normally associated with hospitals and nursing homes for a design-conscious ageing population. Read more in our earlier story.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

See more about Lanzavecchia + Wai on Dezeen »

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile took place from 17 to 22 April. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here, plus photos on Facebook and Pinterest.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Photographs are by Davide Farabegoli.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Here's some more information from the designers:


No Country for Old Men - A Collection of Domestic Objects for the Elderly

The No Country for Old Men collection: Together canes, MonoLight table lamps & Assunta chair

During the Milan Design Week 2012, Lanzavecchia + Wai, a creative studio of Francesca Lanzavecchia and Hunn Wai presented No Country for Old Men, a collection of domestic objects for the elderly.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

To read, to get-up, to move yourself and your possessions around, at home; the project "No Country for Old Men" is a small family of objects that is not only attentive to the daily difficulties encountered by the elderly, but also how it can finally complement our domestic living spaces and acquired laziness.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Together Canes - T-Cane, U-Cane & I-Cane - walking aids for living, not just mobility.

The activity spheres that exist in a home become fluid and blurred with modern living habits and mobile devices. The T, U and I-canes not only provide interstitial support to the elderly, but also allow them and modern dwellers to bring along their tea-time, a collection of magazines and books and also to prop up their iPad for viewing from the sofa or typing out an email or document.

T-Cane - the cane designed for our grandmothers to keep on carrying the tea tray.

U-Cane - the container cane that can be a magazine holder, a knitting basket or…

I-Cane - the iPad cane for the Elderly 2.0.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

The aging process brings about a natural decline in muscle tone and bone density that contributes to decreased mobility, stability, strength and endurance. Actions that are taken for granted can become more difficult with age. Simply standing up from a chair is difficult for some seniors due to muscle mass and strength losses. This is aggravated by our increasingly sedentary work-and-lifestyles.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Assunta assists by appropriating the user’s own body weight as leverage by stepping on the foot bar and as well as assures stability by having arm-rests that follow this tilting motion.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Informed by contemporary choices of material and expression, both aesthetical and functional, Assunta assumes its domestic role by assisting this common action of getting up from a chair as a considered and holistic product.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

MonoLight Table Lamp - a lamp that illuminates & magnifies. Eye-sight deteriorates with age and long-hours in front of the computer screen.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

MonoLight is a handsome table lamp with a magnifying screen and LED components housed in a CNC-machined aluminium enclosure, anchored to a dodecagon-profiled marble base, to enable various degrees of viewing angles.

No Country For Old Men by Lanzavecchia + Wai

The lamp comes in both portrait and landscape models to fit the reader’s viewing preference, and to change the angle, a simple gesture of tilting the aluminium frame whilst the heft of the marble piece keeps it in the desired position.